New Capabilities in Marc 2026.1 You Should Be Using for Nonlinear Analysis

Nonlinear structural simulation is all about making complex behavior simpler to predict. How accurately contact is resolved, how robust a solve is under difficult loading, and how much manual effort goes into building and interpreting a model can make a huge difference in product quality and how quickly it can get to market. Marc 2026.1 targets these challenges. For simulation managers accountable for throughput and CPOs accountable for product quality, this release offers concrete, measurable reasons to standardize your team on the latest version of Marc.

Contact Modeling Made More Robust

Contact accuracy has long been one of the most challenging problems in nonlinear FEA. Marc continues to improve accuracy, robustness, and user friendliness in each release. Marc 2026.1 improves the default contact method in these respects. The contact tolerance, an important tolerance in contact, is now calculated on a per-body-pair basis by default, and tiny contact segments are filtered out. This greatly improves the chances of getting accurate results efficiently without the need to change settings. The contact table is automatically activated from the start of the analysis to reduce the risk of modeling errors. The result is a contact solver that requires less manual tuning while producing more trustworthy results.

A Unified, More Robust Approach to Fixed Time Stepping

This release replaces the patchwork of legacy fixed-time-stepping methods, such as auto-load, creep increment, and others, with a single unified approach that is now the default for new models. Consistent cut-back functionality now extends across all applications, including thermo-mechanical coupling and other multiphysics problems, reducing the guesswork of managing solver stability model by model. A new automatic rotation-based criterion that keeps rotation increments below 20° adds another layer of robustness for problems involving large rotations. For teams that have struggled with inconsistent convergence behavior across analysis types, this is a direct path to fewer failed runs and less analyst intervention.

Meshing and Material Calibration That Save Pre-Processing Time

Mentat's automatic meshing has been significantly upgraded, producing higher-quality meshes for solid sheets and 3D solids, with smoother transitions between refinement regions and fully integrated mesh density controls. Hotspots where a finer mesh is needed can now easily be defined. Support spans triangles and quadrilaterals for 2D and 3D shell applications, as well as tetrahedral elements. This means less time spent wrestling with mesh quality and more time spent on analysis.

Material characterization also gets a significant upgrade. Experimental data fitting for hyperelastic and Parallel Rheological Framework (PRF) models now supports user-defined parameters for secondary plastic networks, along with plasticity, hardening, and damage parameters, enabling more comprehensive calibration from physical test data. Temperature-dependent elasticity for both PRF and hyperelastic models captures stiffness variation due to thermal effects, an important capability for any application where components see a wide operating temperature range.

Better Post-Processing for Complex Assemblies

RBE2 and RBE3 post-processing now supports HDF5 result files, DDM style parallelization, and global remeshing. Critically, when remeshing occurs, the solver preserves tied regions and automatically recreates connections even as nodal positions shift, removing a common source of broken workflows in assemblies with rigid body elements.

Why Upgrade Now?

Marc 2026.1 is tightening the fundamentals that determine whether a nonlinear simulation converges, whether contact behaves correctly, and how much analyst time gets consumed before results are trustworthy. For organizations running demanding nonlinear structural workloads, that combination of robustness and reduced pre- and post-processing overhead makes 2026.1 a clear upgrade priority.

Want to see all the updates to this and other versions of Marc? Check out SimCompanion!